Everest Home Edition

Note July 27, 2007: Everest Home Edition’s free version was discontinued as of 12/5/05. However, version 2.20, as the following review covers, is still available online with a Google Search.

For this week’s Freeware Frenzy I will be taking a look at Everest Home Edition 2.20. This free software allows you to quickly and easily find out about your computer’s specifications, right down to the transistors in your video card. This is extremely useful software for people new to computers and old pros. What is the first question you ask when someone says my video card is overheating? “What video card do you have?” And of course some people have no idea that there is a card in there and not some kind of magical force that makes pictures on the screen. Enter Everest.

Installation is very easy, nothing special to set up. Everest is able to detect all of your system information without the need for you to enter any information. The program is small, only using about 13MB of RAM when in use.
Everest is chock full of information, with any detail you could think of needing. Everest categorizes its reports under nine main groups: Computer, Motherboard, Display, Multimedia, Storage, Network, DirectX, Devices and Benchmark. You can see the subsets of each group here:

Most of those subheadings also contain numerous areas of information. CPUID is very handy to learn about your chip, especially helpful with so many different versions of the same chip running around. In this area I can see what instruction sets my Athlon can support, security features, power management, etc. And let me tell you, now that I know my chip supports Memory Type Range Registers, I can sleep easier. I hope by now you are starting to see the wealth of information this program can give you. The most useful area, and the first one I think everyone should take a gander at, is the Computer Summary. This gives you a handy breakdown of your system, listing OS, Motherboard information, Video Info, Storage, Input, Network and Peripherals. This is the key area for all those troubleshooters who need basic system info and need it now. I could go on listing other information, but you would be here till next week and I’m sure you have busy lives.
Along with all the info, you have a great Preference menu, handy for frequent users. You can go so far as to customize the font that Everest uses to generate system reports. Trivial? Probably. One of those little details that make programs great? Definitely. Report generation is a great included feature that allows you to get a break down of Everything, Summary Only, Hardware, Benchmark or a custom report. Everest can generate said report in text or HTML and when its finished gathering information, approximately 10 seconds later, you can print, email or save the report.

Everest also comes with some great extras. Under the favorites heading, there is a great list of tech websites for news, overclocking, reviews, and modding. There is also a set of links for downloads, and I found useful, drivers. I often make a fuss about Help files, since they are sometimes lacking in free software. Thankfully Everest delivers with an easy to use, illustrated, help file and online forums.
So to sum up, Everest is a great little utility for PC enthusiasts out there. I could drone on about memory benchmarking, my video card having 160 million transistors and how neat it is that for each of my hardware devices, Everest includes a link to the product website, but at a scant 4MB to download and free to use, I think you should spend some time with it yourself. Check it out at: http://www.lavalys.com/
Note that this utility has be discontinued as of 12/5/05.